Brian Garfield (14 page)

“Looks like Riley's closing in.”

“No, that's only the angle you're looking.”

Pack watched them until it was clear no mayhem was forthcoming just at the moment. Joe Ferris said, “I'll get it something to eat,” and went away for a bit. Smelling the slaughterhouse, listening to Finnegan and his crowd, Pack had his look around at the bluffs. Their dominant hue was a faded buckskin. If you put your weight on the dry soil it tended to crumble; everything crunched underfoot—sagebrush, grass, clay, twigs, rocks. But on the gentler slopes there was greenery for livestock to feed on; that was the secret wealth of these Bad Lands.

A beer keg passed from hand to hand through the mob of toughs. Joe Ferris returned with a covered dish. He set it aside and Pack helped him swamp out the filthy jail with soapy water. They swept it onto the clay, where it was absorbed instantaneously and left a chalky white rime. Pack said, “We'll find a way to help you stock the store.”

“There is an investor I can put the touch on.”

“If you're thinking of the Marquis de Morès …”

“The Markee'd give me nothing except the hard end of that heavy stick. Your French friend knows what I think of him …”

“You're wrong about him. Why are you so stubborn on that subject?”

“I know a four-flusher when I see one,” Joe said. He walked away toward the embankment, plodding as resolutely as a man stamping out spiders. Pack caught up with him at the tracks. They stood off to one side a piece from Finnegan and the half-drunk toughs who were braying toward Luffsey as he chased the Lunatic into the river a quarter mile upstream, just below the château on the bluff.

Joe wasn't looking at those two. His attention was directed back the other way—north, downriver. He said, “Speak of Beelzebub!”

It made Pack look that way. He saw a jouncing diminutive horseman emerge from the shadow of a cloud. He was startled. “Roosevelt? You think you'll get a penny out of him? I thought you'd had a falling out.”

“What? What gave you that notion?”

Pack said, “You took him out hunting. Now, two days later you came back alone.”

“He changed his mind, that's all. Decided to ride by himself. I judged he wasn't hunting game; he was hunting solitude. May be he wanted to look the loneliness square in the face. I know he had some things he wanted to forget.”

“Lost his wife and his mother,” Pack said. “I know all that. Is that what makes him so disagreeable, or was he born like that?”

“He's got his own way about him,” Joe said. “What makes you think he's disagreeable?”

“Thinks a lot of himself, doesn't he. Great hunter. Fortunate he didn't find himself looking a bear square in the face.”

Joe hitched up his cartridge belt with the flats of his wrists. “I guess he didn't, as you see. Know Blacktail Creek?”

“Heard of it.”

“Downstream on the east bank, thirty miles north of here, may be more. Anyhow a fair day's ride. There's a good ford. I've taken hunters in there a few times—good big stand of cottonwoods and some bottomland pasture, and the river's wide and gentle about the bend, so you find game often as not. One of the boys told me Mr. Roosevelt staked it out last week. Say he's planning to build a house there. He's calling it Elkhorn Ranch because he found a couple racks of shedded elk antlers interlocked on the ground. Stocking it with a herd of Eastern shorthorns and he's already wired two of his hired men from back East to drive 'em out here. Fellow has got money, Pack. And I can show him a good opportunity to invest a little bit of it.”

Joe watched the horseman's ungainly approach. “Well,” he said dubiously, “good luck to you.”

Riley Luffsey brought the Lunatic across the embankment, half dragging the poor creature. Luffsey did his best to pretend he wasn't winded. The crowd trailed them toward the Bastille. Downriver the approaching Roosevelt must have noticed the activity, for he changed course and advanced.

Pack saw him coming but was drawn by something more vital; after a moment he forgot about the horseman altogether as he kept close watch on the Lunatic in case those eyes, with their profound secret, should rise to meet his own; but the Lunatic stood with his head down, chest heaving, and never gave him a glance. Pack felt obscurely betrayed.

Pack felt the familiar pressing urgency—an insistence to know more. He needed to get beneath the surfaces of things and find out what was hidden in their crevices and shadows and dreams, for only in such inaccessible and guarded places could one hope to find the important secrets.

“I ran him till he dropped,” Luffsey boasted, puffing. “You all see when I butted him into the river there? Gave him a right fine bath. He ‘most bit my nose off but look at him now—not an ounce of fight left in him.”

Frank O'Donnell growled, “Kid, you ought to be playing with a string of spools, all I can say.”

The Lunatic stood in bleary silence while Joe Ferris tried to entice him into the shack with an uncovered bowl of cold rice and beans. Breathing very fast, the Lunatic watched it but seemed too tired to follow Joe.

Riley Luffsey said to Finnegan, “I'm a mind collect on my bet.”

Pack heard growls of agreement from some of the hunters. They all were ready to gather their winnings.

Finnegan scowled at them. He wasn't the sort to take a loss with good grace. His red hair hung long, tangled thick along his shoulders. He glared at Luffsey and angry muscles stood out along his jaw like the strands of a tight hard rope.

Young Luffsey appeared to be unmindful of the displeasure of the man from Bitter Creek. The youth whooped at the sky. He grinned lavishly at Pack. “I'll be famous now, won't I?” Playful, he stretched a foot out behind the Lunatic and pushed, so that the Lunatic fell backwards like a tree that had been axed. In an instant young Luffsey was upon the felled giant, boisterously pummeling him, shouting exuberant nonsense. The great oaf rolled onto his side, cringed, curled into a protective ball, wrapped his hands over his head against the bewildering blows and whimpered.

Joe Ferris ripped the revolver from his holster and pointed it in Luffsey's direction and shouted, “
Let it go!
”

Luffsey rocked back and stared up at Joe.

Pack was astonished.

A growl of dangerous anger rolled through the crowd.

Joe Ferris glared at them all.

The Lunatic crawled around fearfully like a half-squashed insect, knees drawn up, hands over his head.

Joe waved the revolver in a sweep that brought the entire mob within its intimacy. “What a pack of big brave men we got here! You coyotes take your pleasures from watching this poor dumb critter chew gravel?”

Luffsey was getting to his feet. He seemed unable to decide whether to make his face surly or cocky. He took a pace toward Joe Ferris.

Joe cocked the Remington: a loud scraping ratchet of warning.

Pack said, “Now, wait now—”

Fearful and intent, he nearly jumped a foot when Theodore Roosevelt came beside him and stopped his horse at the edge of the crowd. “What's all this?”

Joe Ferris had all his attention on the ruffians. His revolver stirred back and forth, keeping them at bay. “Pack, get the critter's feet under it and put it back in the box where it'll be safe from these drunks.”

Before Pack could move, Roosevelt's piping voice cut forward overhead: “Is this the strange fellow I've heard of?” He dismounted and walked unhurriedly to the Lunatic. “What is it, my friend? Have you something to say? Have no fear.”

Roosevelt's own fearlessness astounded Pack; but then he thought it likely it wasn't courage at all, but merely ignorance.

Anger put a chalk-white strain on Frank O'Donnell's mouth. He had a revolver in his belt. His hand strayed near it but Joe Ferris said, “Frank—don't do that.”

Roosevelt helped the Lunatic to his feet. “Nothing to say, have you?” The New Yorker peered through his dusty eyeglasses at the assembled hunters, and at Pack, and finally at Joe Ferris with the revolver in his hand. Roosevelt said, “This poor fellow deserves care, not ridicule. He certainly doesn't belong
here.'
He pointed an angry digit at the Bastille.

Joe said, “Belongs out in the woods to be its own free natural self—or else someplace where somebody can look after it. Poor critter should not be a toy for the amusement pack.”

“Perfectly right, Joe old fellow. He should be taken away for observation and treatment. There's an asylum at the territorial capital, I believe.”

Redhead Finnegan's hard eyes raked the dude from head to foot. “He belong to you, does he?”

Roosevelt said, “In the sense that one has a responsibility to those who are not fortunate enough to be able to care for themselves. Yes, he belongs to me. He's my responsibility, and yours, and yours, and yours.”

“You have got a leaky mouth, mister.”

Privately Pack agreed with Finnegan. This dude was displaying very bad manners, meddling and preaching; it was unseemly behavior, at the very least, for a greenhorn foreigner.

Frank O'Donnell said, “He's nothing but a half-pint lunger. Ain't got enough wind to blow out a match.”

Roosevelt said, “It appears to me, Joe old fellow, that your friends might benefit from a word or two about such subjects as kindness and decency and moral probity.”

Finnegan said in a low growl, “Storm Windows, I'll make wolf meat out of you—and your friend Ferris too.”

Joe Ferris pointed the revolver at Finnegan. “Not this afternoon, Red.”

“Just where in the hell did you screw up enough foolishness to point a gun in my face?”

“You know this isn't worth a fight, Red.”

Finnegan thought about it.

The Lunatic puffed and blinked. He had most of his attention on Roosevelt; evidently his curiosity was drawn by the irritating screech and the unfamiliar vowels of the dude's talk. Pack found himself glaring at Roosevelt with a resentment that surprised him. There was something odiously vexatious about him. It was enough to put anyone out of countenance.

Joe Ferris's revolver stirred. “You boys don't really give a damn about the critter one way or the other, and I don't believe you want to do injury to a gentleman like Mr. Roosevelt. Red, why not just take the boys back to the saloon and buy a round of drinks. You owe it to them, for those bets you lost.”

Evidently it was the right thing to say, for the tone of the crowd's growl changed. Someone yelled, “Red's buying!”

There was a loud and, Pack thought, somewhat ominous cheer.

Finnegan, sensing the shift in interests, backed down.

“Just one round. On my chalk.”

Joe Ferris essayed a bit of a smile; for some reason Riley Luffsey laughed aloud and that broke the malice.

Finnegan, still irascible, pointed a menacing finger at Joe and then turned it to aim at Roosevelt, but had nothing to say; he walked away and the hunters walked with him.

Riley Luffsey had one more look at the Lunatic, laughed again and bounced swaggering away, calling out ahead: “Wait on, wait on. Don't forget my winnings. I'm faster than a slough pig—I tell you boys I am the speediest man in Dakota! I could've outrun a bullet from Wild Bill himself!”

The Lunatic groveled and groaned. Joe Ferris put the revolver away and studied his own hand with surprise. Theodore Roosevelt skinned his teeth; his tusks gleamed. “Masterful. By Jove, you're a capital fellow, Joe.”

“Just trying to keep the peace.” Joe cleared his throat manfully. “Now if I had the fare, I would be willing to deliver this poor critter to Bismarck, sure enough.”

Pack noted that the sun had peeled skin from Roosevelt's face; he looked mottled as if he'd been too close to a bad fire. Roosevelt said, “I'm seldom mistaken in my judgements of men, and I knew from the outset that our Joe Ferris here was of a finer stamp.”

Pack felt a sarcastic anger that felt unfamiliar: he said to Joe Ferris, “Now, you are sure enough the hero of Medora. Why it's
you
who's the Umpire you were talking about.” He said to Roosevelt, “In generations to come they'll be erecting statues of Joe Ferris all over the nation—people will salute them as they go by.”

“I don't know why you're picking on me, Pack. All I want is a fair shake for everybody and a chance to stock the shelves in my new store and give the competition a run for its money.”

Joe's sly glance edged toward Roosevelt. He said to Pack in a sincere voice, “I wish you had the capital to back me, Pack. We'd show the world. Just a few thousand's all it would take to get me started.”

Pack made a face. He looked at the dude to see if Joe's unsubtle hints were taking effect.

The terms he'd seen attached to Theodore Roosevelt by the press were words that seemed to describe a whirlwind rather than a man:
histrionic, harsh, heroic, ebullient, upright, downright, forthright, bumptious, smug, impatient, loud, opinionated, spoiled, garrulous, gallant, blunt, clear-thinking, stubborn, impulsive, swashbuckling, inexhaustible, vehement, snobbish, dyspeptic….

The slight and slender young man who stood before him now did not have the shoulders to support all those words.

The New York dude climbed onto his horse and settled his feet carefully in the stirrups, adjusted the reins and finally looked up to study the two of them through his gold-rimmed spectacles. His regard settled on Joe Ferris and he delivered himself of a theatrical sigh. “If only to bring an end to your unceasing broad hints,” he said, “five thousand and not a penny more—and I shall expect you to look after my money with a zeal equal to that which you've just displayed in looking after this poor insane chap.”

Without waiting a reply, Roosevelt neck-reined away, lifting the horse to an immediate canter.

With a straight face Joe Ferris said to Pack, “I told you he'd invest.”